President's address

The following are highlights from AARN President Louise Rogers' Address to the Annual General Meeting - May 3, 2000 - Coast Plaza Hotel, Calgary

Nursing in the New Millennium and celebrations for Florence Nightingales 180th birthday. Milestone events in history. A time for us to reflect on our past and focus on the future.

I have done some serious reflecting about nursing, as I reach my 35-anniversary milestone in September of this year. I will attend my reunion, and as we all tend to say: we will talk about the "good old days." I was rereading Sarah Jane Growe's book, Who Cares written in 1990. In it Dr. Josephine Flaherty, former principal nursing officer for Health and Welfare Canada, says: "you mean the 'the good old days' when we had 50 patients; we were on alone at night. We weren't nursing patients; we were just praying that nobody died on our shift."

Or, according to Growe's book, we might say that the "good old days" are before patient classification systems. Systems, which according to Marie Campbell, have replaced individual professional discretion with mechanized work in which every step is task-- directed. Dr. Phyllis Giovannetti, whose research helped the systems get started in Canada, has said that workload measurements may have "gone overboard." The measurements have been misused, with administrators fiddling with the numbers to make them conform to the budget.

Bedside nurses are bound to be alienated when they exercise professional judgement and no one listens. The modern high-tech, low-touch hospital system doesn't give nurses enough time to establish the intimacy that is the trademark of good nursing because it doesn't value that intimacy enough. In fact, in job evaluation for pay equip; it was found that patient contact, the raison d'etre for health care, received the lowest weighted value of any category.

Nurses aren't trying to turn back technological progress, but timing nurses to rush from one room to `the other, calculating so many minutes per patient on the basis of the absolute minimum of care, is not going to recruit and retain nurses whose primary motivation is helping people.

I have spent time revisiting and reflecting on Florence Nightingale's writings. I am always inspired by her insights and their applicability to today. Let me give you a few examples; she writes:

"The ultimate destination of all nursing is the nursing of the sick in their own homes . . But no use to talk about the year 2000. "

On nursing education: "If a nurse is learning, she can't be in the place of another nurse."

On management nursing. "The organization of nursing is as important as direct nursing care itself . . . No one is to have charge of nurses who had not been through the training as a nurse. "

Can you just imagine the consternation there must have been when Florence Nightingale forbade the nurses in the Crimean to report to duty as long as the military insisted the nurses report to the physician instead of Florence. We can see that nursing from the beginning had to be bold and tale risks.

The need to restructure

I believe that the nurses of Alberta have told the AARN Provincial Council to be bold and take risks.

In the fall of 1996, AARN conducted a membership survey. The bottom line on the survey was that members told us that there wasn't much we were doing that they liked. At the same time a sub-committee of council was examining district boundaries. Their final report indicated that district boundaries should not be looked at in isolation of a full structural review.

You, the members, told us that we were an elitist organization, reactive rather than proactive, and that we had unintentionally alienated the membership.

As a result council has introduced a new regional structure to replace the old district structure. This action in no way reflects on the very valuable work carried out by the districts, but rather speaks to an outdated structure. The members viewed the structure as a barrier rather than an enabler to involvement.

The goal of the new regional structure is to take the AARN where nurses live and work. The province has been divided into six (6) regions. While regional health authorities have been clustered to make up our six regions, we do not cut across RHA boundaries, thereby improving the ability to build solid collaborative relationships between our representatives and the members, the public, and the employers.

Council was very clear its three priorities:

RN leadership In shaping the future of health care

A unified nursing community.

Public safety - practice environments that

support safe nursing care.

Leading change

Council is very confident in its role to lead change. They are very clear that they make decisions on behalf of the registered nurses of Alberta in the best interest of the public.

In order to support the political lobbying the association needs to engage in, we have developed an MIA mentorship program. We are linking each MLA with a team of registered nurses within their constituency in order to keep the nursing agenda before them and to be able to influence healthy public policy on a continuum. This is your opportunity to be involved.